Introducción

Desde que dos ilustres historiadores, Francisco Tomás y Valiente, y Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, escribieran sus magistrales obras sobre la venta de cargos públicos en Castilla durante los siglos XVI y XVII, los estudios sobre venalidad han permanecido durante años circunscritos casi por completo a las enajenaciones de regidurías y oficios municipales. Sin embargo, en fechas muy recientes, se ha producido una profunda renovación temática y metodológica de una problemática que resulta clave para comprender algunas cuestiones esenciales de la política, la economía y la sociedad de la España Moderna

Changing braids for towers. The financing of the defensive system inthe Granada Kingdom coast: a venality operation in the reign of Carlos III

Durante el reinado de Carlos III, y en especial en los años que transcurren entre 1762 y 1774, desde la Secretaría del Despacho de Guerra se impulsaron varias operaciones de ventas de empleos militares, utilizando para ello diversas modalidades venales. Una de las más singulares tuvo como escenario el Reino de Granada con el objetivo de reforzar su sistema defensivo costero sin gasto alguno para la hacienda real. El método consistió en evaluar los costes de las fortificaciones —baterías de costa, torres y atalayas— y buscar personas interesadas en correr con esos gastos, a cambio de los cuales el rey les entregaría sus correspondientes despachos de oficiales del ejército. Se trataba de cambiar dinero para obras defensivas por grados en el ejército: una operación financiera en la que el aspirante a un empleo en el ejército realizaba una fuerte inversión inicial que sería devuelta por el rey doblemente: en lo material, en forma de sueldos mensuales, y en lo social, en el prestigio de la carrera militar y los honores pertinentes, asimilados a la hidalguía, que correspondían a quienes desempeñasen empleos iguales o superiores al de capitán. En este trabajo se analiza el desarrollo de la operación venal, sus características, y la sociología de los compradores de los empleos militares.In the reign of Carlos III, specially between 1762 and 1774, some operations to sell army employment were promoted by the Secretaria del Despacho de Guerra, using different modalities of venality to do that. One of the most exceptional was developed in the Granada Reign. The aim was reinforce their coast defensive system without any cost to the Real Treasure. They evaluated the fortification prices —towers, watchtowers, coast batteries— and they looked for some people who were interested in paying them. In exchange for that, the king would give them commissions in the Army. So, it was changing money to defensive fortifications for army employments. In this business, the candidate did a great investment but the king would return to them in two ways: in a material aspect, with a salary; and in the social aspect, with the prestige and honour of army career

PGAS Model for the Implementation of Scalable Cluster Systems

This paper introduces an extended version of the traditional Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) model, for the implementation of scalable cluster systems, that the HyperTransport Consortium Advanced Technology Group (ATG) is working on. Using the Simics and GEMS simulators, we developed a software module that approximates the behavior of a PGAS cluster. This approach mainly provides the simplest mechanism to evaluate how much the PGAS infrastructure will affect overall the application performance. The aim of this work is to study the feasibility of the ATG’s PGAS model for running applications with high memory requirements. Such a model, will let manufacturers build clusters that enable the execution of these applications, in such a way that it will be impossible to run them in a single processor, or in a multi–processor

Nobility And Venality: The Ecclesiastic Market of Sale of Nobility Titles in the XVIIIth Century

A lo largo del siglo XVIII se vendieron títulos nobiliarios mediante vías muy diversas. La venta de honores a través de instituciones religiosas fue uno de los procedimientos más utilizados durante la centuria. Las distinciones que se vendieron en este mercado eclesiástico fueron otorgadas por el rey, el cual, incapaz de hacer frente al sostenimiento de estas instituciones, les entregaba uno o varios títulos nobiliarios para que con el producto de su venta afrontaran los gastos requeridos. Este mecanismo de obtener el honor mediante el desembolso de una cuantía determinada, impidió el control social de la Corona sobre los agraciados y provocó la alteración de la jerarquía establecida. Las instituciones religiosas para vender su “mercancía” se valieron de “agentes” especializados en la burocracia de la Corte, los cuales buscaban clientes con el capital suficiente como para realizar la compra. La mayoría de los que se titularon llegaron de Indias, aunque también hubo comerciantes peninsulares y miembros del patriciado urbano que invirtieron en su promoción social.During the XVIIIth century nobility titles were granted by means of very diverse routes. The sale of these honors through religious institutions was one of the most used procedures during the century. The distinctions that were sold in this ecclesiastic market were granted by the king, who, unable to face up to the maintenance of these institutions, delivered one o more nobility titles in order to get some money weth the sale to pay the needed expenses. This mechanism of obtaining the honor by means of the payment of a certain quantity of money, prevented the social control of the Crown on the new acquirers and provoked the alteration of the established hierarchy. The religious institutions to sell his “goods” used of “agents” specializing in the bureaucracy of the Court, which were searching clients with the sufficient capital to realize the buy. The majority of those who were titled came from The Indies, though there were also peninsular merchants and members of the urban oligarchy who invested in his own social promotio

Study on antenna mutual coupling suppression using integrated metasurface isolator for SAR and MIMO applications

A metasurface based decoupling structure that is composed of a square-wave slot pattern with exaggerated corners that is implemented on a rectangular microstrip provides high-isolation between adjacent patch antennas for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and Multi-Input-Multi-Output (MIMO) systems. The proposed 1-2 symmetric array antenna integrated with the proposed decoupling isolation structure is designed to operate at ISM bands of X, Ku, K, and Ka. With the proposed mutual coupling suppression technique (i) the average isolation in the respective ISM bands listed above is 7 dB, 10 dB, 5 dB, and 10 dB; and (ii) edge-to-edge gap between adjacent radiation elements is reduced to 10 mm (0.28λ). The average antenna gain improvement with the metasurface isolator is 2 dBi. © 2018 European Microwave Association.This work is partially supported by innovation programme under grant agreement H2020-MSCA-ITN-2016 SECRET-722424 and the financial support from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under grant EP/E022936/1

Fish welfare and biological rhythms : time to regulate

In this article we introduce the concept of biological rhythms in fish welfare and critically discuss a neglected aspect: time-dependent issues. First we should consider that fish, like most living organisms, posses a clock that drives rhythmic biological functions. Therefore, fish stress responses are strongly affected by the time of stressor exposure (e.g. day/night) according to their daily pattern of behavior (diurnal/nocturnal). Furthermore, drugs affect fish differently depending of time of administration. For instance, commonly used substances such as anesthetics may have strikingly different effects depending on the time of day. MS-222 -the most widely used fish anesthetics- has fastest effects and higher toxicity when applied during daytime, but it is much less toxic at night. Surprisingly, no attention has been paid to this time-dependent factor when establishing dosages and protocols for fish anesthesia and euthanasia. In summary, there is a need to take into account properly the role of biological rhythms when discussing fish welfare issues and regulations by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC).En este artículo se introduce el concepto de ritmos biológicos en el bienestar de peces, y se discute críticamente un tema olvidado: aspectos dependientes del tiempo. Primero debemos considerar que los peces, al igual que la mayoría de organismos vivos, poseen un reloj interno que dirige los ritmos biológicos. Por tanto, las respuestas al estrés de los peces están fuertemente afectadas por la hora de exposición al agente estresante (p.e. día/noche) en función de su patrón diario de comportamiento (diurno/nocturno). Además, los fármacos pueden afectar de forma diferente a los peces dependiendo de la hora de la administración. Por ejemplo, sustancias comúnmente usadas como los anestésicos pueden tener efectos llamativamente distintos dependiendo de la hora del día. El MS-222, el anestésico más ampliamente utilizado en peces, tiene efectos más rápidos y mayor toxicidad cuando es aplicado por el día, pero es mucho menos tóxico por la noche. Sorprendentemente, no se ha prestado atención a este factor temporal cuando se establecen dosis y protocolos para la anestesia o eutanasia de peces. En resumen, es necesario tener en cuenta adecuadamente el papel de los ritmos biológicos cuando se discute el bienestar de peces y su regulación por los comités de uso y cuidado de animales

Root-targeted biotechnology to mediate hormonal signaling and improve crop stress tolerance

peer reviewe

Grain quality as Influenced by the structural properties of weed communities in Mediterranean wheat crops

Weed community structure, including composition, taxonomic and functional diversity, may explain variability in crop quality, adding to the variability accounted by management, climatic and genetic factors. Focusing on Mediterranean rainfed wheat crops, we sampled weed communities from 26 fields in Spain that were either organically or conventionally managed. Weed communities were characterized by their abundance and taxonomic, compositional and trait-based measures. Grain protein concentration and the glutenin to gliadin ratio were used as indicators of wheat grain quality. Linear mixed effects models were used to analyze the relationship between crop quality and weed community variables, while accounting for environmental factors. Nitrogen fertilization, previous crop and precipitation explained a large portion of the variation in wheat grain protein concentration (R2marginal = 0.39) and composition (R2marginal = 0.26). Weed community measures had limited effects on grain quality (increasing R2marginal of models by 1% on average). The weed effects were related to the composition and the functional structure of their communities, but not to their abundance. Environmental conditions promoting higher protein concentration were also selecting for weed species with competitive attributes, whereas the role of weed functional diversity depended on the functional trait and on the resource limiting crop grain quality. Understanding the mechanisms of weed effects on crop quality could aid on designing sustainable weed management practices.This research was supported by grants AGL2012-33736 and AGL2015-64130-R funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe”. D.J.G. was partially supported by the United States National Science Foundation (DUE 1758497 and DUE 1949969)Postprint (published version

Circulating levels of sclerostin are associated with cardiovascular mortality

Cardiovascular diseases are a health problem throughout the world, especially in people with diabetes. The identification of cardiovascular disease biomarkers can improve risk stratification. Sclerostin is a modulator of the Wnt/β-catenin signalling pathway in different tissues, and it has recently been linked to vascular biology. The current study aimed to evaluate the relationship between circulating sclerostin levels and cardiovascular and non-cardiovascular mortality in individuals with and without type 2 diabetes. We followed up a cohort of 130 participants (mean age 56.8 years; 48.5% females; 75 with type 2 diabetes; 46 with prevalent cardiovascular disease) in which serum sclerostin levels were measured at the baseline. Time to death (both of cardiovascular and non-cardiovascular causes) was assessed to establish the relationship between sclerostin and mortality. We found that serum sclerostin concentrations were significantly higher in patients with prevalent cardiovascular disease (p<0.001), and independently associated with cardiovascular mortality (p = 0.008), showing sclerostin to be a stronger predictor of mortality than other classical risk factors (area under the curve = 0.849 vs 0.823). The survival analysis showed that an increase of 10 pmol/L in the serum sclerostin level resulted in a 31% increase in cardiovascular mortality. However, no significant association was observed between sclerostin levels and non-cardiovascular mortality (p = 0.346). From these results, we conclude that high sclerostin levels are related to mortality due to cardiovascular causes. The clinical implication of these findings is based on the possible use of serum sclerostin as a new biomarker of cardiovascular mortality risk in order to establish preventive strategies.The authors declare that this work was support in part by Consejería de Salud y Bienestar Social (Junta de Andalucía) Grants (PI0207-2016 to Dr. Beatriz García-Fontana), and Fondo de Investigación Sanitaria (Instituto de Salud Carlos III) Grants (PI12/02141, PI15/01207 to Dr. Manuel Muñoz-Torres), with co-financing from FEDER. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript and there was no additional external funding received for this study